Weatherwatch: Lord Byron's reflection of the rain in Genoa

The English poet in a letter to his half-sister describes a colossal downpour in the Italian city

Lord Byron is in Italy near Genoa and sees a monumental deluge. “But being on a hill we were only nearly knocked down by the lightning and battered by columns of rain and our lower floor afloat with the comfortable view of the whole landscape under water, and people screaming from their garret windows; two bridges swept down, and our next door neighbours, a Cobbler, a Wigmaker, and a Ginger-bread baker, delivering up their whole stock to the elements, which marched away with a quantity of shoes, several Perukes, and Ginger-bread in all its branches,” he writes to his half-sister Augusta Leigh in November 1822 in Lord Byron: Selected Prose, edited by Peter Gunn for Penguin (1972).

He continues: “The whole came on so suddenly there was no time to prepare. Think only, at the top of a hill of the road being an impassable cascade, and a child being drowned a few yards from its own door (as we heard say) in a place where Water is in general a rare commodity.”